The creation and storage of digitized data has proliferated in recent years. Accordingly, techniques and mechanisms that facilitate efficient and cost effective storage of large amounts of digital data are common today. For example, a network environment of nodes may be implemented by an enterprise as a data storage system to facilitate the creation, storage, retrieval, and/or processing of their digital data. Such a data storage system may be implemented using a variety of storage architectures, such as a network-attached storage (NAS) environment, a storage area network (SAN), a direct-attached storage environment, and combinations thereof.
The foregoing data storage systems may comprise one or more data storage devices configured to store digital data within data volumes. A storage device may, for example, be a disk drive (e.g., hard disk drive (HDD)) organized as part of a disk array. Such data storage devices are not limited to disks or even magnetic storage devices and thus may, for example, comprise a solid state drive (SSD) or combinations of the foregoing. Individual storage devices of a data storage system may be identified by a logical unit number (LUN) or other identification scheme.
In a data storage system, information is stored on physical data storage devices as volumes that define a logical arrangement of storage space of the data storage devices. Information in the volumes is typically organized in a file system, which is a hierarchical structure of directories, files and data blocks. An example of a file system is a write-anywhere file layout (WAFL). A file may be implemented by the file system as a set of data blocks configured to store the actual data on one or more storage device of the data storage device.
A trend has developed in recent years to move many computing services, include data storage services, to multiple client (e.g., multiple different, unrelated client entities, such as may comprise independent and unassociated individuals, business entities, etc.) environments, such as cloud computing environments (i.e., computation, software, data access, and storage services system configuration in which the end-user, client, client system, etc. is agnostic and/or ignorant with respect to the physical location and configuration of the various system resources by virtue of shared underlying system resources) as may be hosted via the Internet. Such multiple client environments offer advantages in economies of scale, outsourcing of computing services, use of thin clients and less capable terminals (e.g., smart phones and tablet personal digital assistants) by users, and improved scaling.
There is an increasing demand for secure, multiple-client storage networks where client devices share the same physical storage infrastructure but having separate logical storage resources. Further, client devices require the ability to independently monitor/control such logical storage. Meanwhile, storage network administrators may be required to monitor/control both physical and logical storage entities in the overall storage network.
As the storage network administrators and client devices monitor distinct groups of storage entities within a storage network, and because they have different practical requirements for administering based on their particular usage, previous monitoring and control tools utilize separate management software to allow for independent management and monitoring of resources by an administrator and a client device. For example, object models corresponding to an overall network within management software configured for a network administrator are generally not usable by a user of the client device because the information used by the network administrator may not provide for adequate logical separation of storage entities (e.g. due to intermingling of information regarding physical and logical resources), and therefore, client devices would not be given access to such resources. Likewise, tools provided for client device do not organize and model the storage system in a manner that is useful for network administrators which require a more global control platform than is contemplated by object modeling in such tools.